February 28, 2005

Oscar Night - Winner: Visual Effects

SPIDER-MAN 2

Congratulations to the Spiderman 2 Visual Effects Team. The work they did on Doc Oc's Tenticles and the vfx during the Train Sequence was exceptional, but it's not something we haven't seen before... think of the Matrix Sentienels. They also did a lot of the digital backgrounds that were created and developed in the first Spiderman. The digital backgrounds still look amazing and much more perfected in 2, but of the 3 nominees, my vote went to I-Robot, and my true vote went to The Day After Tomorrow, its a crime that this film was not nominated...

RYAN

Back to Best Visual Effects:

ACCEPTANCE SPEECHJohn Dykstra: I love my job. What an honor to be singled out in a year with so much terrific work. Boy, am I glad there wasn't a forth episode of THE LORD OF THE RINGS! What a joy to work and share this award with so many talented people ... Our director, Sam Raimi, Scott, Anthony, John. All of the artists, technicians and producers that collaborated on the effects for this picture. We'd like to thank our families. Hi, Cass, Chloe, Mom. We'd like to thank Sony Pictures for all your support. Thank you Academy. Thank you, everyone.

Their families for their constant support, and the artists and managers at Sony Pictures Imageworks, Sony Pictures Entertainment and the countless number of people who helped to create Spider-Man 2, with special thanks to:

Anthony LaMolinara would like to say a special thanks to the entire Animation Crew at Sony Pictures Imageworks and Scott Stokdyk would like to thank everyone associated with the project for their hard work and dedication.

NOMINEES IN THIS CATEGORY
SPIDER-MAN 2 (Winner)
HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN
I, ROBOT

From What Dreams May Come to Spawn to Bedazzled, Hollywood keeps sending film characters to hell and vfx artists keep struggling to visualize it in an imaginative and convincing way. Since heaven and hell are ultimately very personal beliefs, it is almost impossible to create imagery that will satisfy everyone. This turned out to be a major challenge for everyone involved in Francis Lawrence’s Constantine, the big screen version of the Hellblazer graphic novel (the title was changed to avoid confusion with the Hellraiser franchise). Supernatural detective Constantine (Keanu Reeves) has literally been to hell and back. This traumatic journey left him with special powers that he uses to hunt evil on Earth. He is approached by police officer Angela (Rachel Weisz), who wants to solve the mysterious suicide of her twin sister. Their investigation takes them to a world of demons and angels that exists just beneath our reality…

The task of putting Lawrence’s vision on screen was awarded to overall visual effects supervisor Mike Fink: “I had just finished X-Men 2 for producer Lauren Schuler-Donner when she asked me to supervise Constantine. Originally, the script called for 250 shots, but we ended up creating more than 500 shots. I had six or seven vendors on that project. The main facilities were Tippett Studio, ESC (in what would eventually be their last project), CIS Hollywood, Hydraulx and Hatch FX.”

Designing A New Hell
From the beginning, Lawrence wanted to stay away from the traditional imagery of bonfires, horns and pointy tails. He had very specific ideas about what hell should look like. “Francis had been impressed by footage of nuclear blasts that he had seen,” explains Fink. “Right before the shockwave, there is a heat wave that melts everything away. You can actually see surfaces being superheated before the whole thing is blown away. Francis wanted this moment to form the basis for the look of hell in the movie. His idea was that hell is a parallel universe. It exists in another dimension as a complete replica of our world. You have the same buildings, the same streets, and the same rooms. The difference is that everything seems to be perpetually hit by a nuclear heat wave. This universe keeps decaying forever. It just never stops. We started to look at nuclear blasts footage and our main source of information was the material that Peter Kuran of Visual Concept Engineering had been able to declassify for the TV movie The Day After (1984). Another major source of inspiration was the disturbing work of Polish artist Zdzislaw Beksinski. His paintings of decaying corpses and corroded universes really echoed Francis’ vision.”

In one major sequence, Constantine goes back to hell and arrives on a freeway littered with hundreds of car wrecks, while a hellish downtown Los Angeles looms in the background. The sequence was executed by Tippett Studio, as were all the movie’s hell shots. “The freeway sequence was photographed on a 80-foot large set surrounded by a green screen,” notes Craig Hayes, co-founder and visual effects supervisor. “Our task was to extend this environment and create a hellish rendition of the real Los Angeles. The question was: what would the city look like if it were eternally hit by a nuclear heat wave? From a conceptual point of view, it was pretty challenging.”

A World Of Particles
Tippett Studio did a Lidar scan of the set and sent a crew to downtown Los Angeles to run a similar task on the main buildings. Reference photographs of the façades were also taken. Although the action is supposed to take place in Los Angeles, the freeway set matched no real location. “We took a very stylistic approach to L.A.,” confirms Hayes. “Some buildings are not where they should be. It is sort of a mythical view of the city. Using Maya, we modeled all the structures and street elements -- power lines, streetlights, trees -- in the computer. These models were then laid out in low resolution to create a CG version of the city. Once the position of each element was approved, we figured out which one had to be in high resolution. We then created a matte-painting of the city that was projected onto the CG geometry.” The skies were also matte-paintings that were designed to match the look and texture of a thermonuclear cloud. Rendering was handled in RenderMan while Shake was the compositing tool.

The next step was to create the billions of particles that flow through the scenery. “In the footage of an atomic blast, you can see the surfaces melting down and thousands of tiny elements being scattered by the nuclear wind,” adds Hayes. “We tried to match that by rigging our models to generate an endless flow of particles. Each shot contains up to 60 layers of particle elements. We wanted people to almost smell it! The action was photographed without any dust on the set, although there were huge wind machines generating the appropriate turbulences on the actors. It gave us clean plates onto which we could build particle layers in a very controlled way.”
As if this end-of-the-world environment was not enough, hell happens to be the home of some terrifying creatures: the scavengers who walk the streets and the seplavites who fly. Both hunt down the hopeless humans and devour them. Worst of all, the victims never truly die. After each horrifying death at the creatures’ hands, they “come back” and the hunt starts all over again. “This is like Groundhog Day in hell,” observes Fink. “Everything keeps happening again and again. And each death makes the next one more painful as the victims remember what it was like and they also know that there is no end to it. They will be devoured again…”

The general look of the creatures was conceived by production designer Naomi Shohan with input from Lawrence and Fink. While doing research for Constantine, she came across photographs of corpses in an autopsy room. The bodies were all shrunken and the top of the head had been cut off at eye level to allow access to the brain area. The director deemed these images to be really compelling and approved the concept. Aaron Simms of Stan Winston Studios was then brought in to design the creatures. After a maquette had been approved, Tippett Studio scanned it and used the data as the basis for the CG model. “We ran animation tests and found that the character was too skinny,” reveals Hayes. “It looked fine as a static model, but when it moved, it tended to look like a stop motion armature. So, we added about 15 pounds of flesh to beef him up. In terms of animation, we found it difficult to convey emotion or personality without eyes. They really are the soul of a character. In order to compensate, we worked a lot with body language, overdoing at times the animation to make a point. We made some really graphic moves in the shoulder and hand areas. We also cheated a little bit by adding glitter in the eye area to suggest that there were, after all, eyes in there…”

Confronting Hell Minions
Simultaneous to the creation of hell itself, Tippett Studio was responsible for many manifestations of hell on Earth. One of them involved the fight of Constantine against the Vermin Man, a creature made of millions of bugs and maggots. As the character is able to appear and disappear at will, plate photography required Reeves and three stuntmen to perform a complex choreography. The stuntmen played the Vermin Man at different positions around Constantine and helped the actor to focus his eye line and adjust body language. They were later painted out by Tippett Studio and replaced by a computer-generated Vermin Man.

Originally, the sequence was awarded to ESC and the facility produced such spectacular results that 14 extra shots were commissioned. However, in the meantime, ESC had folded and could no longer contribute to the project. Fink then awarded the extra shots to Tippett Studio. “Interestingly enough, the concept was similar to the sequence that we had created for Matrix Revolutions in which Neo speaks to a ‘face’ made of thousands of flying machines,” observes Hayes. “We started by modeling different maggots and created about a dozen animation cycles. We then used a particle animation system to apply these cycles to the thousands of maggots that formed the shape of the character’s body. Officially, the Vermin Man is comprised of millions of bugs, but when we got to 50,000 individual models, render time became unmanageable. We ended up cheating a lot not to exceed 50,000 models while still creating the illusion of having millions of them on screen.”

Tippett Studio also tackled two exorcism sequences. In the first one, Constantine extracts a demon out of the body of a little girl and traps it into a large mirror. “This sequence was filled with challenges,” comments visual effects producer Jay Heapy. “How would the demon interact with the mirror? What would the mirror world look like when the demon entered it? What happens when the demon reaches back through into our world? The director knew what he wanted, but he also allowed us to run with his ideas and try new things. We did a lot of studies in how the demon would get from the possessed girl to the mirror’s surface, the smudges it left on the mirror, how the cracks and holes in the mirror formed and looked. The shots were photographed in an actual apartment with a practical mirror. A greenscreen set up behind the window made lighting a challenge since we had to establish what kind of highlights or lighting the director wanted based on an unknown source.”

In this exorcism scene, visual effects producer Jay Heapy said the crew had to come up with a practical approach to bring the scene to life. Images courtesy of Tippett Studio.
The second exorcism sequence involves Angela and Mammon, a powerful demon hiding inside her. Through out the shots, Mammon fights with Angela and, at times, stretches her stomach with his face. “Early on, it became obvious that any sort of physically based simulation would fall apart quickly,” explains Heapy. “The team started the simplest way possible: our CG Mammon pushes up through a simple cloth-like sheet modeled to match Angela’s stomach. We looked at the results and came up with ways to make it look better: we put some dampening geometry between Mammon and the sheet; we also had Mammon’s hands control how the sheet folded, stretched, and relaxed; finally, we made it so the veins and other internal layers could move differently from adjacent layers to help show that Mammon was pushing through lots of stuff.”

From Hell To Heaven
During the climax of the movie, one character is taken to heaven. The sequence was awarded to Hatch FX and executed by founder and lead matte-painter Deak Ferrand. Interestingly, the artist had already created (for Pacific Ocean Post) the famed sequence of the heavenly city in What Dreams May Come and also contributed to Hellboy. “I don’t know if heaven and hell are becoming Deak’s trademark, but I do know that, although the sequence comprised five shots only, it was extremely important to the movie,” observes Fink. “We had very little screen time for these shots, and yet, they had to carry a lot of weight. I think we did our job right, because the audience loves these shots.”

Alain Bielik is the founder and special effects editor of renowned effects magazine S.F.X., published in France since 1991. He also contributes to various French publications and occasionally to Cinefex. He just finished organizing a major special effects exhibition that will open Feb. 20 at the Musée International de la Miniature in Lyon, France. Displays include original models and creatures from 2010 Odyssey Two, Independence Day, Ghostbusters, Cliffhanger, Alien Vs. Predator, Alien 3, Pitch Black and many more. The exhibition will run through Aug. 31.

*Constantine* opened to a solid $34.6 million, according to estimates, for the four-day President's Day holiday weekend. It was the biggest opening ever for an R-rated film during any four-day holiday frame, and it was a company best for WB for the President's Day weekend.

The opening for the Francis Lawrence-directed "Constantine" set several records of its own this weekend: It was the biggest opening ever for an R-rated film during any four-day holiday session, and it was a company best for Warners for the Presidents Day weekend, topping "Message in a Bottle" ($18.8 million). The debut of "Constantine" also topped the first weekend of another untested, R-rated sci-fi actioner starring Reeves -- 1999's "The Matrix" ($27.8 million).

Warner Bros. approves a Constantine sequel based on the weekend's take !

US Box Office as of April 22-24, 2005 - Constantine has a Gross of $74,480,921 and has been in release for 10 weeks.

Robert Zemeckis was honored with the VES Lifetime Achievement Award for his enormous contributions to the visual effects industry and to filmmaking as a whole. The honor was presented to him by Academy Award® winning visual effects artist Ken Ralston and long-time friend and collaborator Tom Hanks. Robert Abel was honored posthumously with the Georges Melies Award for his contributions to the visual effects industry and Don Shay received the Board of Directors Award for illuminating the field of visual effects through his role as publisher of Cinefex. The ceremony was presided over by VES Executive Director Eric Roth.

We are doing some fun stuff, cute furry cg animals and some, well... interesting combinations of creatures... this along with some other interesting vfx work. So rollover, sit, but don't beg, this doggy treat comes barkin' at you toward the end of the year.

February 10, 2005

Son of the Mask Screening & Clips

Enough with Constantine already!

Tonight we are getting a special screening of Son of the Mask here in Berkeley! Tippett Studio completed around 200+ shots for the film (can't recall the final shot count), and I think I composited around 8 of them...

Until then, check out some Clips from Son of the Mask over at Yahoo! Movies that contain some of Tippett's visual effects work. One of the clips has a couple shots I completed... check out "Baby and Dog" and look for the shots after Otis is Charred from the exploding bone, there is one when baby Alvey crawls into frame and roars, and the next shot when Otis jumps up to the chandelier, exciting stuff!

• "Otis And The Mask" -- Otis the dog turns into a different creature when he unintentionally wears the mask of Loki.(This was one of Tippett's 'Otis' sequences as Otis 'the dog' puts on the mask and transforms into 'smookin otis')
• "Baby And Dog" -- Alvey Avery (Liam Falconer) has fun playing a dangerous game with Otis the dog.(Another of Tippett's 'Otis' sequences)

February 8, 2005

Constantine Production Information

"Heaven and hell are riht here, behind every wall, every window, the world behind the world. And we're smack in the middle." -John Constantine

It was an ongoing collaboration between production design, cinematography, visual and computer effects and Stan Winston's creature artists to achieve the filmmakers' vision for Constantine's rich landscape, all of it coordinated and inspired by Francis Lawrence who watched as many of is original sketches expanded to fill whole soundstages.

John Constantine's world is a dark and moody place. Visually, it's the very definition of classioc noir, with its urban night scenes, deep shadows, slivers of street lamps on wet asphalt, and gently swirling smoke - all interpreted by skewed camera angles and expressionistic lighting. "The overall look," comments Shuler Donner, "is saturated and beautiful, but gritty. It evokes a sense of period, in a way, but its totally contemporary."

Lawrence met with renowned production designer Naomi Shohan, whose recent work on American Beauty earned her a BAFTA Award nomination. Seeking to realistically depict specific regions of Los Angeles, "not Beverly Hills, not Malibu, but downtown," the director explains, he was particularly impressed with Shohan's natural-looking work on the urban drama Training Day, remaking that, "she really understood Los Angeles, the ethnicity and textures I liked, and we bonded instantly over the approach." Together with location manage Molly Allen, Lawrence and Shohan prowled the city for the architecture and vistas of their story.

Among the sites selected were the Hacienda Real Nightclub, housed in the basement of the historic 1930s Eastern Columbia Building in downtown's commercial and theatre district, which provided an appropriate eclectic and underground flavor as Midnite's bar with its red-hued decor and ornately carved wood and brass detailing; the 5th Street Market, whose interiors and exteriors became the liquor store in which Father Hennessey and Balthazar have their final confrontatio; St. Mary's hospital, Long Beach, which doubled as Ravenscar; and the Angeles Abbey Memorial Park in Compton, as Midnite's office and cavernous reliquary. Built in 1923, the Abbey interior features elaborate ironwork and carved limestone, which Shohan's team augmented with statures, tapestries, artwork, religious relics, and an assortment of antique weapons and armor to represent Midnite's imposing collection.

Constantine's apartment, unusually long and narrow, was designed in a place Lawrence was already familiar with, the Giant Penny Building on Broadway, downtown, whose upstairs interior office walls had been broken out to form an extended space lined with windows. Thinking it had great potential as Constantine's home base, he showed the space to Shohan, who then added metal shutters to the windoes and bottles of holy water that Constantine has lining the walls for protection.

>>> HELL FREEWAY...
Additionally, the production used six Warner Bros. Studios soundstages for such comprehensively constructed sets as the hospital's hydrotherapy room, in which several climatic battles rage between the forces of good and evil, and a representative section of the 101 Freeway, which occupied nearly 22,000 feet and took eight weeks to complete.

Based upon the director's premise that heaven and hell exist as a parallel dimensions occupying the same space and that there is a heavenly and hellish version of every spot on earth, Shohan explains, "I imagined that hellish transformation to any landscape would be a state of constant cataclysmic shifting - exploding, imploding, blowing, burning, decaying. Hapily, Francis and I agreed that if you were in Los Angeles the quintessential hell version of the city would be a section of its infamous freeway."

As Constantine attempts to confirm the afterlife fate of Angela's sister, Isabel, he must visit hell to look for her, a treacherous journey on which he embarks from Angela's apartment. The instant he crosses over he appears in a scorched and gutted version of Angela's room, and from there climbs out onto the street and up to the highway, buffeted by fierce winds swirling with ash, with fire, and chaos all around. "You can't beat the image of Constantine walking down the center of a decomposed 101 Freeway in hell," says Lawrence, and, going for the irresistible joke, "most people who live in Los Angeles think the 101 Freeway is hell already."

Meticulously designed to look like the real thing, the section of road was built to nearly standard specs, with the exception of narrowing the lane width from 10 to eight feet and layering three lanes instead of four. "Rails, dividers, lamp posts and signage were all built to highway department standards," Shohan confirms. "The surface is concrete poured over wooden scaffold and dividers are concrete over carved foam."

Among the set's most striking details are the approximatley 40 vehicles, racked up in various states of disitegration. As Shohan explains, "The cars are wrecks purchased from collectors. We wanted certain models for their paticular shapes. These were then cut-up, re-configured and embellished with foam carving to make them appear mutated. We added wire and foam-formed stalactites to look like melted metal and evereything was covered in latex-and-hemp pieces we made to have the appearnce of skin with roots or veins growing in it. Finally, the whole set was age-painted in rust and brown to complete the look of waste, decay and constant diabolical transformation."

Coordinating with Shohan to use this detailed practical set as a foundation and starting point, Visual Effects Supervisor Michael Fink replicated and extended it digitally. Wrecked cars were remodeled in the computer so that each one could be further eroeded or blown away by acrid winds and so that digitally created demons and lost souls in hell could be moved around and through them. Fink describes the look he was striving for, as "an incredibly harsh environment like the aftermath of a nuclear blast except that instead of lasting nanoseconds it lasts forever." A visual effects supervisor since the early 1980s on a range of high-profile feature films, Fink counts among his credits an Oscar nomination for his work on 1992's Batman Returns and more recently oversaw effects on the blockbuster hits X-Men and X 2, where he collaborated with Constantine producer Lauren Shuler Donner.

Craig Hayes, visual effects supervisor at Northern California-based Tippett Studio (The Matrix Revolutions, Hollow Man), led a team of artists who replaced the set's green screens, incorporation photographic elements with digital design for what he calls "a fluidly dynamic effect," grafting objects onto existing images and generally "adding debris, airborne particles and detritus, burning palm trees and the entire hell-L.A. environment." In addition to extending and enhancing the focal point of the ruined roadway, the film required realistically scaled hell-scape vistats of Los Angeles extending out in all directions, "starting in Hollywood and going past the Capitol Records building to the right, all the way to downtown, "Fink outlines, "all of it pretty much seen as it really is, with some allowances for the scale to enhance the drama."...HELL FREEWAY <<<

Working closely with both Fink and Shohan as well as with Francis Lawrence, was Oscar-winning director of photography Phillippe Rousselot (A River Runs Through It), a master at capturing mood. With more than 30 years in the film industry in both his native France and the U.S. and credits including 1994's atmospheric Interview with the Vampire and more recently looking for something different, and when something like this comes along, that I had never seen or even thought of before, it's very motivating," he says.

Basing much of his compositions and stylistic choices for Constantine on the graphic novel orgins of the story, Rousselot explains that he incorporated "a lot of wide angles, both hight and low, and the kinds of extreme points of view that you often see in comic books, which I thought was very important to maintain. In terms of light, we played a lot with contrast and colors, going with some very deep greens and oranges." At the same time, the cinematographer was careful not to copy the comic book style, preferring a more subliminal effect and drawing inspiration from many sources, including a folio of photographs from Cuba, that Lawrence shared with him. "You can't transfer pages into moving images; it's more the general idea of graphic novels that we were touching upon." Equally subtle were his nuanced depictions of heaven and hell, avoiding "the cliches of light and dark."

Overall, Rousselot opted for natural lighting, guided by Lawrence's desire "to keep the light organic and simple." But simple doesn't necessarily mean small, as evidenced by the sheer number of lights used, in on instance, for Constantine's sequence in hell. A total of 60 space lights hung from the ceiling of Stage 21, designed to move freely with the winde created by seven immense industrial fans positioned along one side of the freeway set. Their irregular movement provided an intensely dramatic quality. Additionally, Roousselot ran alongside his camera crew during many close-ups holding an exttended pole with a paper-covered China light on Keanu Reeves - a personal touch that allowed the cinematographer to capture precisely the right effect.

Rousselot's most precarious task by far was the bathtub scene, in which Rachel Weisz, as Angela, is fully submerged and held down by Constantine to facilitate her brief passage into the next world. "We wanted to have Rachel's point of view while she's underwater, when she opens her eyes and looks up. But of course there's no room in the tub so we shot it through a mirror," he says. Adding a mirror to the mix increased the potential of the unintended reflections, already complicated by the water, which, Rousselot explains, "reflects not only images but all the practical light."

DEMONS HALF-BREEDS AND SEPLAVITES:

When I was a kid, I could see things. Things humans aren't meant to see."-John Constantine

February 4, 2005

A Perfect Circle video "Passive" takes the Hell Freeway

In A Perfect Circle's latest video, "Passive" were taken on teaser ride through Constantine's Hell Freeway sequence! They intercut hellish treated footage of the band and actors mimicing shots from the film, with real final hell freeway shots from the film, its pretty damn great to see some work I did in A Perfect Circle video, heck 3 of my shots are in it... not too shabby!

I saw them in Bakersfield a little over a year ago, they're pretty mindblowing to hear live... ok so check out the "Passive" video now! (widows media)
see also: aperfectcircle.com
video link courtesy of: fanscape.com

February 2, 2005

Concept.org San Francisco Workshop 2005

ConceptArt.org recently (Jan 7-10) had its 2005 workshop where you had a chance to meet up with talented artists from all over the world while having professionals performing lessons, round-tables, demos and discussions.

Looking through some pictures from the event, there were a lot of cool demonstrations and sessions that created a lot of great art... Take a look at some of it below: